After laying off 4,664 workers, Canada’s top six banks have recorded a combined profit of $35 billion and set aside a bonus pool of $12.5 billion for their executives at the end of 2015. It has become evidently clear that Canada’s bankers have not felt the pain of the economic crisis the same way as the working class and impoverished.

The arrival of the smart-phone application Uber has thrown the taxi industry into a state of disarray. First launched in June 2009 in San Francisco, the application has spread rapidly and today finds itself in over 300 cities in approximately 58 countries. While it offers many advantages over traditional taxis, including lower rates, it is having serious effects on the living conditions of taxi drivers. In Canada, the opposition of taxi drivers to Uber was most recently seen in Toronto where taxi drivers blocked streets and one taxi driver was dragged down the street after confronting a suspected Uber driver. These events are only the most dramatic in a series of reactions to the arrival of the Uber phenomenon around the globe.

Through the spring and summer of 2015, Canadian housing prices – driven almost entirely by Toronto and Vancouver markets - saw feverish growth. Such rapid inflation in prices - which drives people out of the cities, places the homeless and vulnerable on the streets, and prevents young people from starting out on their own - results from the irrationality of capitalism, where housing is viewed as an investment for the rich rather than an actual home.

Aboriginal women from Val-d’Or, Quebec, have come forward with deeply disturbing accusations of physical and sexual violence by officers of the Sureté du Québec (the Quebec Provincial police force). The allegations were uncovered by Enquête, a CBC Radio-Canada investigative program, and made public on October 22nd. Enquête had been investigating complaints that the SQ had not taken the disappearance of Sindy Ruperthouse, an Algonquin woman who went missing from Val-d’Or in April 2014, seriously - in the process unearthing a pattern of rampant and sickening abuse by local police spanning as far back as two decades.

Trudeau and the federal Liberals have successfully duped the Canadian electorate into thinking they are a left-wing party. The tragedy is that the “balanced budget” policy of Tom Mulcair’s NDP allowed them to pull off this trick.

The march to globalized capitalist rule will not end with the TPP. So long as capitalism exists, the trend towards monopoly and the ever-increasing power of ever-larger multinational corporations will only continue, with workers in different countries left to compete for scraps from the bosses’ table.

The signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement has brought attention to one of the most overlooked facets of the Canadian economy – that is, the system of supply-management in dairy. Now more than ever Canadians must be wondering what this system is, how it affects them, and why it has drawn the ire of foreign governments. What exactly is happening in the Canadian dairy industry? And what do Marxists propose to do about it?

The Bank of Canada (BoC) has now acknowledged that the Canadian economy likely contracted by 0.6% from January to March, and by 0.5% from April to June. With this, Canada, for the first time since the 2008-2009 financial collapse, has entered into a recession.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has reacted with deafening silence to the release of the summary report and findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) on June 2, which called the Indian residential school system an act of “cultural genocide.”

Throughout their nine years in power, the Conservative government has developed a tradition of brushing off the concerns and challenges faced by Canada's aboriginal peoples. The latest example to get national attention is the failure of the Nutrition North Canada Program (NNCP), which was meant to ensure the affordability of healthy foods shipped to isolated Northern communities, where food insecurity is up to six times the national average. Since it was implemented in 2011, prices of food and other basic necessities have skyrocketed, leaving some with no option but to scavenge in garbage dumps to feed their families.